


Bright Objects

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Collaboration, Enthusiastic Consent, Explicit Consent, F/M, First Love, First Time, Fluff, Loss of Virginity, Rare Pair Spring Fling, Rare Pairings, Spring Fling 2020, Summer Camp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:47:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24280798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Her hands steal under the hem of his shirt to sweep her fingers, with bare and hesitant contact, over the small of his back. His skin is sticky and gritty with the salt of his drying sweat. It’s gross and intimate and she likes it immensely.We're friends, she’s supposed to remind him, but what she whispers against his mouth instead is, "You're warm." She strokes the pads of her fingers over the ridges of his shoulder blades. "Why do you get so warm?"His hands press into her back."I don't know."
Relationships: Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson
Comments: 105
Kudos: 295
Collections: RPSF 2020: Summer Camp





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the Rare Pair Spring Fling crew:  
> [granger_danger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/granger_danger/pseuds/granger_danger)  
> [provocative_envy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy)  
> [scullymurphy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullymurphy/pseuds/scullymurphy)  
> [the_static_hum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_static_hum/pseuds/the_static_hum)
> 
> The world outside was a strange and terrifying place during the months(!) we spent working on this project, but the time I spent at Camp Pigwidgeon with all of you was an absolute joy. Let's do this again sometime.
> 
> My forever gratitude to my incredible AlphaBet and friend [dreamsofdramione](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bugggghead/pseuds/dreamsofdramione) for her skillful editing and constant kindness. I don't deserve you.
> 
> Any remaining mistakes are my own.

At the end of the marble countertop, next to the wire mesh bowl of small, mealy red apples and bananas that consistently go brown before they’re thrown out, Pansy Parkinson finds two standard white envelopes and one heavy nine by twelve packet addressed to her over the course of three weeks.

She understands, of course, the steady stream of choices she's made day in and out over years that eroded the solid ground between what she _would have liked_ and what she _gets_ until the fissure that separates them is as large as the kind of vast oxide red canyon you ride through on a mule.

She knows how she got here. But it doesn’t make it any easier to accept the only offer she’s given.

“It’s an excellent school.” Her father adjusts the strap of his Rolex, then peels back the skin on a freckled banana from the basket on the counter. The state university turned him into the kind of lawyer that cooks Kraft macaroni and cheese on a gleaming brass Viking range and pulls his milk out of a SubZero fridge.

It’s good.

It’s good enough.

Once she’s accepted—and it isn’t even a grudging acceptance, it’s passive and resigned—Pansy goes through the motions of finishing her Senior year.

She drives the getaway car for the theft of the wooden viking mascot from its creosote-soaked plinth in the middle of the quad at the high school down the hill. Two weeks later, she conducts intelligence that traces her own school’s chipped and grimacing plaster bear to an alcove behind a rival gym. At the end of May she stands still while her mother’s seamstress pins her blue satin prom dress at the bust and waist and hips, and complies with Pansy’s request to shorten it to the middle of her thighs. The slogans she smears over the windows of her friends’ cars in white shoe polish two days before graduation are forward-looking. Aggressively cheerful.

It’s a final burst of controlled chaos meant to sweep them all over the finish line of childhood like a conquering swell, and Pansy knows, intellectually, that it’s fun.

It’s all so fucking fun.

“I should have studied for my SATs.”

The sun bakes the backs of her legs where she lies prone on the carpet next to the massive arched window set in the south wall of her bedroom. It feels warm and nappish and familiar. So does the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear and the wad of Bubble Yum she’s molding against the backs of her front teeth with her tongue.

“You did fine. The U is a great school.” Tracey offers a sympathetic but unsatisfying ear. She cared a _little_ bit more, tried a _little_ bit harder, and came home to not one but three weighty envelopes on her kitchen counter offering to carry her someplace new.

“I could have _tried_ , though.”

She could have. But there’s a difference between “I tried and then I failed,” and “I failed because I didn’t try," and when offered a choice, Pansy's always taken the latter.

“I’m going to miss you.” Pansy blows a bubble—a bit of a dud—and pops it. The summer has been deeply weird already and her own honesty keeps catching her off guard.

“I’ll miss you, too," Tracey says. "Terry Boot’s going to Boston, but I can’t make fun of his pleated chinos without you.”

“I’ll be _so_ pissed if you do.”

“You packed for camp?”

Pansy pushes at the corner of the suitcase lying open next to her bed with the tip of her big toe. “No. Sort of.”

“Are you excited?”

“To sleep on a plywood bunk bed for another summer so my dad can relive his boyhood vicariously through me?” Pansy can already smell the Pine Sol and vinyl undertones of the mess hall. “No.”

“But you’re a counselor. All that power.”

“I do get a whistle.”

“Make sure you bring bug spray.”

Pansy closes her eyes and imagines Tracey on the other end of the phone. She’s almost certainly lying on her stomach across her canopied bed, ankles crossed, flipping through a copy of _Elle_ or _Vogue_ , and Pansy is aware that they might never talk in exactly this way—with patch-of-sunlight idleness and big, comfortable stretches of silence—again.

She draws air down to the bottom of her lungs.

She shoves it all out.

“That’s like the first thing on the list.”

* * *

“I think I might fuck Neville.” Lavender waves a gust of smoke from the bonfire out of her face and knocks back a swig of her fourth strawberry daiquiri wine cooler.

“What?” Pansy nearly drops her own bottle, fished out of the bottom of a trash bag full of ice forty minutes earlier and still full to the neck. “What do you mean, you 'might fuck Neville'?”

“Don't you think?” Lavender tilts her head to the side and contemplates. “I mean, look at him.”

From her seat on the opposite side of the fire, Pansy has been watching Neville off and on, because of his relationship with the mosquitoes.

He sits with careless posture at the end of a half log bench, making his way through a warm can of Sprite, periodically wincing and slapping himself in the neck. The single-minded desire mosquitoes have for his body is one of the enduring traditions of summer at Camp Pigwidgeon. It’s as necessary as telling the seven year-olds there’s a giant squid in the lake and writing your name and the year on the wall next to your bunk in Sharpie.

“I’m looking at him.” Pansy’s not sure what she’s supposed to see beyond his annual battle against contracting a tropical virus. She blows across the top of her bottle and it makes the shrill whistle of an oncoming train. “I give up.”

“Oh, come on. He’s always been super cute. And he’s, like, six foot two now. His t-shirt rode up while he was stretching during orientation and he’s got an adorable little four pack.” Lavender rubs an appreciative circle on her own abdomen. “If you don’t want him, I’m going for it.”

Pansy jolts and turns to stare at her. “Why the fuck would I want him?”

“I don’t know. I thought that since he's . . . you know."

“No. I don’t know whatever it is you think you know.”

Lavender drains her wine cooler and grinds the bottle into the litter of pine needles under the bench. “Well, if you do want him, I won’t—”

“Go for whoever you want,” Pansy says, standing up. “The smoke’s blowing over here. I’m moving.”

She walks around the fire, holding on to the neck of the bottle she’s never going to finish.

By the open tailgate of a rusted out truck, Draco’s staring at the nipples of a random skeeve named Scab or Rabies in cutoff jean shorts who doesn’t seem to own a shirt.

It’s only slightly less of a shock than the sight of steady, reliable Cho leaning against the trunk of a tree with her eyes half-lidded, letting the new counselor, Cormac—some Pi Kappa Alpha golden god who looks like he’s a shoo-in for a beer pong scholarship—drag his undoubtedly sweaty hand over the bare stretch of skin between her waistband and the knotted front of her shirt.

Counselor hookups are as inevitable as the mosquitoes, but what the _fuck?_

Pansy makes her way over to the half log bench and sits on the ground next to Neville’s knee.

“Hey, Pans. How’s your summer so far?” 

“Fucking perfect.”

“Nice." Neville scratches his shin. "Did you bring any OFF?”

She looks up at him. “Did I bring any what off?”

“Oh.” He clears his throat. “I mean did you bring any bug spray out here?”

“Do I look like I have any bug spray with me?”

Neville slaps his thigh. When he lifts his hand, there’s a splatter of bright red blood. “I guess not.”

Pansy leans her head back against the bench and flicks her tongue over the opening of the bottle. Wine coolers taste like the game Candy Land looks and are exactly half as fun. She has no intention of actually drinking this one.

Cormac leans into Cho and tucks his fingertips into the front of her waistband. He says something at her ear that makes her take his hand, then he stumbles after her on the track leading from the bonfire down to the moldering buildings at the shore.

“What the _fuck?_ ” Pansy says.

“He seems nice.” 

“He’s not nice, he’s the Ghost of Paternity Suits Yet to Come.” She sets her bottle down, unconcerned when it tips and empties into the pine needles.

“Ready to be on lifeguard duty with me again?” He smiles, lopsided and sincere. She has no idea what Lavender’s talking about. He’s precisely the sort of predictable, good-natured Neville she’s gone to camp with each year from the time she was ten. But when he knocks his knee lightly into her shoulder, she’s forced to concede that she feels smaller sitting next to him than she did last year.

He’s grown. People _grow._ It doesn’t mean you need to fuck them.

“I'm ready for my whistle.” She claps a mosquito out of the air next to his ankle.

“Hermione said you’re going to the U?” He’s wearing a hooded state college sweatshirt, navy blue with bright white block letters, like it's something he actually wants. The interrogative lilt at the end of his sentence makes Pansy want to slap his neck.

“Yeah. I’m going to the U.”

“You’re not excited about it?"

She knows she's _supposed_ to be.

It’s a great school.

Not too close to home.

Not too far.

“No. I’m not.” Pansy stands up. She doesn’t feel like talking about it. At all. “Shit. My foot fell asleep.” She hobbles away on her pinpricking sole.

“Where are you going?” Neville asks.

“I’m swimming to the Island.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

The strip of dirt that switchbacks from the woods down to the lake goes to the trouble of skirting a patch of stinging nettles, but is otherwise overgrown and almost useless. By the time Neville catches up to her at the bottom, her shins are cross hatched in pale red lines.

“How much have you had to drink?” he asks.

"Is your name Scott Parkinson?"

"No."

“Then you’re not my dad, Neville.”

He doesn’t say anything else.

It’s well past midnight, and slightly more than half a moon hangs over the lake. The water is completely still except for the periodic blip and ripple of a trout and the dry rustle of bats glutting themselves on Neville’s mosquitoes. In the eastern half of the lake, the Island squats in the dark, a low black silhouette studded with evergreen spires and a single old growth hemlock rising over their heads.

A laugh, amplified by Natty Light, rolls down the hill and out across the water, pings against the trees hugging the opposite shore and comes back again.

Somewhere along the near shoreline there’s the unmistakable sound of a moan.

Pansy tears her shirt off over her head.

“What are you—”

She's slipped off her Keds and kicked her shorts over her feet before Neville finishes his question.

Stripped down to her bra and underwear—the cotton kind, practical for camp, in pale grey and white stripes—she wades out to her knees and dives in.

Briefly, her muscles seize and her lungs give up their air in the transition from the thick summer heat to the slick cool body of the lake, but before the shock has really begun she's passed through it. She turns her face to breathe and watches a sheet of water trail off her arm.

It’s almost exactly 400 meters from the end of the dock at Camp Pigwidgeon to the crescent of bare dirt beach marking the mouth of the trail that loops around the Island. From where she jumped in on the opposite side of the lake, it’s slightly farther, but distance is good. It’s exactly what she wants.

Alone in the dark, her feet sweep through the water above the twisting bodies of the trout and below the glowing bisected coin of the moon. Her body in motion is a verb, not _to try,_ or _to fail,_ but _to be_ , and when she _is_ —alone, afloat—the knot that’s tightened inside of her chest for months falls loose.

It's peaceful—a real John Denver Rocky Mountain High sort of experience—right up to the second she feels something that isn't a trout moving in the water behind her.

She coughs on a mouthful of lake, and turning around, half expects to see death come to call in the form of some B movie waterborne machete horror. It’s only Neville. He’s in the lake with her for reasons known only to him.

“What the fuck _,_ Neville?”

He doesn’t give her an answer and she doesn’t wait for one, kicking her legs to start again. She swims hard enough that her lungs start to burn, but she's too late. By the time she skirts the algae-slicked sides of the fallen, half-submerged trees lurking like naval mines around the perimeter of the Island, he’s already sitting on the shore, watching her.

She crests the steep drop-off from the shallows at the landing and drags herself to her feet. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Neville sits with his hands hooked around his knees, breathing easily. He shakes his head once, throwing a spray of water around himself, and the hair pasted to his forehead springs into waves. Droplets plip from the ends onto his nose and his bare chest and shoulders. He looks strangely content.

“Why did you follow me?” she asks.

“You shouldn’t swim by yourself.”

Pansy rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Now you’re wet.”

"It's alright."

He's stripped down to his blue cotton shorts. His skin is pale this early in summer, and in the blue white light reflecting off the lake, he looks soft and spectral, watching her with his head tilted to one side.

She wants to yell at him to leave her alone, but he’s a difficult person to stay angry with. Not that Pansy hasn’t tried.

Good old Neville. Good, considerate, safety-minded . . .

Pansy’s halfway through that thought, still standing in the shallows with water dripping off her elbows and coursing down her legs when the disaster happens.

She's certain that while they all unpacked their bags in their cabins that morning and pulled on their new camp shirts, he was the same Neville that he’d always been.

Maybe he was a few inches taller. Maybe he'd lost the last of his baby fat, and his skin had finished clearing up, but he was still himself—quiet and hesitant, the sort of person who kisses his grandmother goodbye through the driver's side window of her gold Nissan. She expects him to accidentally hit himself in the face while twirling his guard whistle again this year, and won’t be surprised if he falls into the space between the dock and a canoe. He’s still more enthusiastic than a person should be about bagel sandwiches, mild and harmless and as fascinating as a room temperature can of Sprite.

It happens just like a Magic Eye picture.

One moment the boy sitting on the shore in front of her is the abstract pointillist cluster of desaturated dots—the loose collection of minor disappointments—that is Neville Longbottom, and the next they've resolved into the clear image of a young man.

He’s truly tall now, and his face is angular and adult. His eyes are still wide set and downturned, thoughtful and kind, but most of the uncertainty and all of the worry has been chased out of them.

She wouldn’t have thought twice about standing in front of the correct Neville Longbottom in her underwear. She’s done it before, during other summers, under similar circumstances.

Standing in front of _this_ Neville in a soaked and translucent bra—with his curling hair and white marble body, a Greek demigod in blue cotton shorts—is a catastrophe.

He's still looking at her.

She shivers and wraps her arms around her waist. Her skin is studded with goosebumps.

“What?” She sounds sharp and defensive.

“You're shivering. You should get out of the water.”

She’s been ready with a rejoinder for every _should_ since she first learned to talk, but this time she comes up empty-handed. She slogs through the shallows and sits next to him, leaning back on her elbows in the dirt.

“Happy now?” The Magic Eye won't unresolve, and she can’t bring herself to look at him.

“Are you warm?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’m happy.”

The light from the bonfire seeps through the trees, but Camp Pigwidgeon, sprawling along the southern shoreline, is dark. So are the windows of the few private cabins and lake houses. Above the lake, more stars make themselves visible than seems strictly necessary, and the static cloud of the Milky Way arches over the southern half of the sky, dull and electric. Pansy has the brief, troubling sensation that she’s going to fall off the Earth and go rolling like a tumbleweed into the dark desert of space. She presses her fingertips hard into the dirt to hold on.

The sky is motionless, vast and awful, but then a line appears, like the casual stroke of a bright white pen.

“Meteor!” She turns to Neville, flush with victory, as though stargazing were a winner-take-all contact sport.

He’s so close she can see the beads of water dewed in his eyelashes.

“We should come back out in August.” He’s still the wrong Neville, and he’s looking at her, tracing along the lines of her face. Water keeps dripping off of his hair onto his torso; fascinated, she watches a drop course down the middle of his abdomen and disappear into his navel.

“What are you looking at?” She wants to sound annoyed, but she doesn’t, and she isn’t.

He brushes a strand of hair back from her forehead with his thumb. “You.”

“Why would we come out here in August?” Her shoulder wants to settle against his, so she lets it.

“For the meteor showers.”

He tilts his head, and her eyes drop closed.

She wonders how the old Neville kissed.

This one does it so softly that she forgets to hold on, and falls into the sky.

His fingers land against her cheek, his touch tentative and maddeningly reserved, and she thinks someone should tell him that his gentleness makes her ache.

But her mouth belongs to this damp Perseus on the lake shore, and he's _using_ it, very sweetly, so she doesn't say anything at all.

She considers whether or not he can feel her pulse, knocking hard at the surface of her skin.

Her mouth does what it wants, without asking her for permission, and opens to him. His fingers twitch against her cheek.

“Fuck!” A shout, with a burst of laughter close on its heels, sounds out from the northern shore and echoes around the lake. Startled, Pansy turns to look.

Blaise, in a fresh white camp t-shirt, stumbles down the path from the bonfire. Behind him, someone with long pale hair trips and falls, and once they're on their knees, starts laughing. Lavender. They’re both drunk.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Perseus's belly lift and fall as he breathes.

"Pansy?" His voice, quiet and urgent, stirs the fine hairs at her nape.

She should give her mouth back to him, since it's his.

She turns toward him.

Toward _Neville._

A mosquito whines in her ear.

She blinks a drip of water from her eyes.

She shivers in her underwear.

On the Island.

In the dark.

 _Oh my fucking God,_ she thinks.

Neville Longbottom is a beautiful man, and she’s been kissing him on his mouth.

For a _while._

She jumps to her feet.

Fuck this summer. Fuck camp. Fuck the U. Fuck Candy Land. Fuck puberty. Fuck every single second of high school she spent listening to her mother's copy of Patti Smith’s _Horses_ on vinyl and copying eye make-up looks out of _Cosmo_ instead of doing her Trigonometry homework. 

“Pansy?”

_Fuck._

She’s not going to turn around.

“They’re going to jump in the lake. Idiots.” There's a soup of novel and distressingly vivid feelings boiling away in Pansy's belly, and she wants nothing to do with any of them. She walks down to the lake and trudges through the shallows, then without looking back at Neville, pushes off as hard as she can into a dive at the drop-off.

She doesn't hear him dive in behind her, and he certainly doesn't pass her in the water. She's alone this time on her way across the lake, and with every stroke she feels more certain than she has in months. Because as vague as the rest of her future seems, she’s decided that she’s not going to look at Neville Longbottom again for the rest of her life.

* * *

It’s not that she ignores anyone.

She’s not fucking rude, unlike some people who go around surprising you by getting their suddenly adult male bodies soaking wet.

It’s just that she lets a Neville-shaped hole open up in her awareness.

She carefully fails to notice that he's in shorts and a t-shirt and white Vans slip on sneakers and that he has calf muscles as she’s walking behind him and Oliver Wood on the way to the mess hall for breakfast the following morning. She certainly doesn’t pay any attention to the fact that the fine hairs on her arms rise when, after he uses up the last of the half and half, he reaches around her to set the refilled jug on the counter where she’s pouring herself a cup of over-brewed, stale Folgers.

Because what even _is_ a Neville Longbottom, when you really think about it? No one _asked_ for one. No one wanted to _know,_ and you go eight summers without any problems with one before he goes ambushing you with his stupid gentle mouth when you’re almost naked.

Fucking _rude._

“Have you seen his little red shorts?” Sitting on the floor next to her bunk in the girls’ counselor cabin, tying off the end of one long, heavy braid in her profligate mass of dark blonde hair, Lavender’s eyes flash open wide. “I don’t even care. He can take me up against a wall.”

The image appears in Pansy’s mind of Lavender’s thighs wrapped around Neville’s hips, in the dark, against the brown plank siding at the back of the boys’ counselor cabin. If an idea like that made someone’s insides sear and cramp up with nausea, that would be unexpected and uncalled for. Pansy is thankful that it doesn’t happen to her.

"Sure." Ginny lies propped on her elbows across Hermione's bed, sucking on a Tootsie Pop. "But tell me about Blaise. I've heard he has an enormous—"

Pansy tunes them out. Lavender weaves a second braid and discusses the known properties of Blaise's junk with enthusiasm until, without any warning, Hermione stops folding and refolding her cotton underwear.

“You know what?” she begins.

 _Oh_ , thinks Pansy. _This should be good_.

Hermione explodes into a speech about female support, cherishing friendships, community, _something something_ memories and how camp is not about having sex with boys who are mostly bad at it. Pansy hears approximately half of what she says and agrees with a quarter of it.

Camp is not about sex. It’s about getting through seven weeks of a summer job and keeping your appealing lopsided mouth to yourself.

Pansy twists a hank of her own dark French bob then lets it go. Lavender paints stripes of glossy lilac polish over her toenails, and Pansy thinks idly, _generally,_ about whether boys with blond hair would tend to prefer blondes, or not.

* * *

Not that it matters.

Not that she _cares_.

Pansy is a focused water safety professional. She communicates as needed. She does her job.

She's not trying to get into anyone's shorts.

Late on a Monday afternoon two weeks into camp, she stands at the edge of the cordoned swim area, her body sun-browned, shining and coconut-scented with Banana Boat SPF 30, mentally counting off the last round of swimmers as they leave the water.

She blows a massive bubble, pops it, and draws the gum back into her mouth while Neville climbs down from the guard stand.

Pansy's all-time least favorite camper—a smarmy little twelve year-old creep who keeps "accidentally" dropping his oars in the middle of the lake and needing a boat rescue—walks by, playing with his drawstring.

“Is your suit bugging you, Josh?” asks Neville.

Josh sniffs, lake water dribbling off the hem of his shorts. “Yeah, it keeps coming undone.”

“Can I help?”

Josh shows Neville his drawstring. It’s a continuous loop without cut ends, and the tie Josh has in it looks loose.

“There’s a way to knot this kind, bud.” Neville spends five minutes talking Josh through a complicated series of loops that results in a neat and sturdy-looking bow. “Come see me tomorrow before you get in the water and I’ll show you again.” He slaps Josh lightly on the back as he walks away. Pansy watches Josh trudge up the hill, and observes with shock and awe that he doesn’t fiddle with his drawstring once.

“Help me with the boats?” Neville asks once the kids have trailed up to the showers. Pansy nods, her eyes hidden behind her black plastic Ray-Ban aviators.

They’re settling the final canoe into the rack in the boat shed when Lavender bounces down the slope from the Lodge, her braids swinging against her back.

Pansy takes off her sunglasses and busies herself taking inventory of the First Aid kit. If Lavender wants to come and put her hands all over Neville's shorts and test the hardness of the walls of the boat shed, she’s perfectly welcome to.

Pansy is making a mental note to ask Percy to bring down more Band-Aids when Lavender leans in the doorway, fiddling with the pastel pink hair tie at the end of one braid.

“Hey,” she says, drawing the word out. 

“Hey.” Neville looks at Lavender expectantly.

“Hermione said you have tonight off." She’s speaking to Pansy and Neville, but mostly to Neville. "A couple of us are going to walk into town later. Maybe get burgers?” She has the personal aura of a large funfair bag of blue and pink cotton candy.

Pansy trains her focus on rearranging the sterile alcohol prep pads so that the print is all oriented the same direction.

“That sounds great.” Neville crosses his arms and leans against the wall.

He leans. Lavender leans. They're both such great leaners.

“Awesome!" Lavender boings slightly on the balls of her feet. "I’ll come by the cabin later?”

“Sure, yeah.”

Lavender pops back up the hill, her braids dangling like a loose set of reins.

Pansy pulls out a pair of tweezers to inspect them. 

Neville moves close and brushes up on his leaning skills against the wall next to the First Aid kit. “Will you come?”

“To what?” She clacks the tweezers twice, then tucks them back into place.

“Into town?”

She glances at him.

He’s been out in the sun for two weeks, and everything about him is golden.

“You’re going with Lavender.”

He shakes his head. “I think it’s a few—”

“You should go with Lavender.”

“I don’t—”

“She’s very blonde, if you're into that.” Pansy flips through a stack of plastic thermometer sleeves. “ _You're_ blond, I can’t imagine you don't like blondeness.”

“Pansy, what’s—”

“She has little shorts. _You_ have little shorts.”

Neville looks down. “My shorts are little?”

Pansy slams the metal door of the First Aid kit shut and latches it.

“They’re tiny!”

“They are?”

Neville has been walking around the swim area in too-small red shorts since camp started. Pansy can only assume they’re the same shorts he was issued last year, but he’s grown at least three inches between that summer and this, and the hem stops at the top of his thighs. There are no secrets remaining about the shape of his backside.

The shorts are small, and he isn’t, and sometimes he strips off his white uniform t-shirt—which is _also_ slightly too small—just as they reach the shower block after guard duty.

All Pansy wants in life is for people to wear clothes that fit them.

“Look." She turns and jabs a finger against his thigh. “This is the tan line from your other shorts, and this”—she slides her finger upward, to the hem of his little lifeguard shorts at the top of his thigh—"is where _these_ shorts end, and . . .”

She looks up and trails off, because Neville’s eyes are open wide.

“Pansy.” His voice is helpless. “I’m sorry I kissed you.”

“What?” Pansy pulls her hand back.

“If you’re mad at me because of what happened on the Island, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“I’m not mad at you.” Pansy crosses her arms over her stomach. She opted for a red two-piece suit for lifeguard duty this year, because they’re easier to deal with when you need to pee, but she’s suddenly struck by a profound feeling of exposure.

“You seem mad.” He’s being plaintive again, and she hates it.

Pansy shakes her head. “I’m not mad.”

“Okay.”

“We’re _friends,_ Neville.”

“I know. I want to be friends.”

He’s been standing in the sun for hours today. He smells good, like line-dried laundry. She badly wants to touch his shirt.

And she supposes that if they're friends, maybe she can, so she reaches out and lays her palm over his belly. His abdomen tightens under her hand.

“You’re warm,” she says. And he is. She puts her other hand against him, too.

She’s never felt more naked in her bathing suit than she does when he lays his hands on her hips.

“You're really tall,” she says, like he should apologize for it. The top of her head falls short of his chin.

“Yeah.” He looks down at himself. “I guess.”

"I'm not kissing you again."

He does nothing at all to curb the disappointment on his face. "Okay."

She lifts up on her toes.

With her chest pressed against his warm ribs and her fists bunched in the front of his sun-white shirt, she’s acutely aware of the shape of him.

She’s always so completely aware of him, now.

He's briefly still, then bends his mouth down to hers.

It’s soft like it was before, for a long time, but then his tongue flicks lightly against her lip like it’s asking permission, and—yes, obviously.

Yes.

She parts her lips, and they both make absurd, small, pleased, pleading sounds while they kiss each other’s open mouths. Pansy’s always thought that licking another person’s tongue should be awkward and repellent, and sometimes, with other boys, it has been. With Neville, it's secretive and shy and completely wonderful and fills her with the urge to take her own and other people’s very small shorts off. Pansy slips her hands up and around his back, hunched over so he can reach her, and pulls herself into him.

His palms run up her sides and he spreads his fingers out across her back, one hand between her shoulder blades, and one just below, and all she can think is: he’s so warm.

Not that she _cares_ , particularly. He can be as warm as he wants, and if Lavender wants to wrap her legs around him after burgers, that’s fine. He’s not Pansy’s. She doesn’t want to keep him. She's not _applying_ to attend Neville in the fall. They’re just doing open-mouthed kissing in the boat shed today.

_He’s so warm._

Pansy pushes her belly against him. She knows she shouldn’t be surprised, but when he makes a different sort of sound and his hips jerk forward, she breathes in sharply and steps back.

He looks like he’s three quarters of the way through running a marathon, pink and sweaty and mildly traumatized.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.”

She’s flushed and warm, too, with sweat gathering at the base of her spine. “We need more Band-Aids." She sounds angry. And maybe she is.

Band-Aids are an essential.

Neville lets a hand fall casually, covering his shorts. “We do?”

"Yes." She clenches one hand around her whistle like she's about to blow it. "I'm not kissing you anymore."

"Oh."

"I'm going to go tell Percy."

A look of terror sweeps over Neville's face. "That we've been kissing?"

"That we're out of Band-Aids."

"Oh." Neville looks shell-shocked. "Right now?"

"Yes."

“Okay.”

Pansy turns to leave, then stops in the doorway and turns back. "You should go get a burger."

"Should I?"

"Yes."

"I don't think I want a burger."

Pansy's shoulders untense. "You don't?"

Neville shakes his head. "No."

"Well, you should." He should, and he probably will. Who isn't eventually going to eat a burger when it’s prancing around in front of them every day? People get _hungry_. "Everyone likes burgers. They're _delicious_."

She heads up the hill, walking too fast, to find Percy Weasley and tell him about the Band-Aids.

But not the kissing.

* * *

Anyway, they're not going to kiss anymore.

She reminds him when they're tucked into the shrouded space behind the maple tree at the fork in the trail leading to the boys’ cabins. She’s pushed up onto her toes, with her arms tight around his middle and her flashlight dangling from a strap around her wrist.

“We’re friends,” she says, coming up for air.

“I know.” His hair is wet. He smells like Irish Spring and tastes like peppermint toothpaste.

  
  


* * *

Lavender’s toenails alternate aquamarine and cautionary yellow the next week, her braids wound up around her head like a Dutch milkmaid and gleaming in the amber last light of the evening.

“Do you think he’s had sex before?” She narrows her eyes like the possibility has just occurred to her that he hasn't.

It’s a Friday, and Pansy sits cross-legged at the edge of the playing field next to Millie Bulstrode and her ubiquitous sketchbook.

"Neville?" asks Ginny from the middle of a hamstring stretch. "I seriously doubt it. How’s the seduction going?"

Lavender leans back on her elbows and closes her eyes against the sun. "Slow. I think he likes me, I just wonder if he's inexperienced."

Pansy’s silent behind her Ray-Bans, chewing her gum and staring out at the middle of the close-mowed lawn where Neville and Oliver are tossing a Frisbee back and forth.

“You were sitting together forever at the campfire last night.” Ginny switches legs. “Then you left at the same time. I thought maybe something happened.”

“No. He said good night at the top of the trail and took off." Lavender stretches both legs in front of her and bends herself improbably in half, wrapping her hands around the soles of her feet. “Maybe he’s gay?”

Millie smirks. “Maybe he likes brunettes.”

It’s a movie night, and all the kids are tucked away in the Lodge with popcorn, M&Ms, and 2-liters of off-brand root beer under Hermione and Percy’s watch.

Pansy’s disinterest in Ultimate Frisbee is aggressive and immutable, but it feels good to sit in the grass and do nothing.

Neville isn’t a natural athlete, not to the degree of Oliver or Cedric on his team, or Ginny, Charlie, Cormac, and Cho on the other, but he’s holding his own.

Pansy allows herself to look at him.

He’s wearing a rolled bandana around his forehead like Charlie does, his little shorts, and a t-shirt that seems to fit.

Sometimes he’s himself, all gangles and knees and a profound lack of competitive edge, catching the disc against his chest on an awkward jump and falling back on one foot. But then he snaps the disc out of the air with his arm extended and his shirt rising up, smiles, and makes a perfect return. He’s Perseus then, his hair shaggy and gilded, stripped pale by the sun and tangled from the lake and the hard, sulphurous well water that runs in the showers.

Lavender's on his team.

“Like this.” He’s showing her how to snap her wrist while she throws.

She does seem to be trying, and she’s probably legitimately awful, but Neville stands behind her and puts his hand over hers to show her what it should feel like when she does it right.

Pansy jumps up. “I’m going to take a shower.”

"You okay? Millie spreads her hand out over whatever she's working on in her sketchbook and looks up.

"I'm fine."

She's so fine that as she’s walking across the field toward the cabins, Pansy doesn’t turn around to see why Lavender and Neville are both laughing.

He finds her an hour later, her hair wet and smelling like green apple, sitting on an aging split rail fence and looking out over the lake.

The sun settles behind the trees on the western shoreline. Emptied of swimmers and boats, the lake mirrors the dilute blue sky and a field of clouds saturated in cadmium pigments of orange and yellow.

She thinks about disappointment—about the gap that can grow between what a person actually wants and what they end up getting, and she thinks that sometimes she doesn't know the difference between the two until it's too late.

 _To fail to try is to try to fail,_ she thinks, like a motivational speaker in a junior high gym.

“You left,” he says.

She swings one leg and then the other over the fence until she sits with her back to the lake.

“I’m not into Frisbee.”

"I get that.” His smile lifts slightly higher on the left side than the right.

“Who won?” She takes her sunglasses off and hangs them from the neck of her t-shirt.

"We did. We had Oliver."

She ignores her first impulse.

Her second impulse is to hop down off the fence and carefully walk around him. To go back to her cabin, lie down across her bed and file the uneven nail on the ring finger of her left hand, or finally crack the spine of the single novel she brought with her.

The first impulse comes roaring back, and she opens her legs.

He steps between her thighs, then wraps his arms around her waist like he's certain of something.

His shirt is damp. He smells like sweat and sunscreen and men’s deodorant.

They’re friends, so they kiss.

Then they kiss some more.

He’s careful, she knows, to not press himself too close. He keeps his angles polite, his hips canted away, even while she’s brushing at his lower lip with the tip of her tongue and digging her heels into the backs of his thighs.

Her hands steal under the hem of his shirt to sweep her fingers, with bare and hesitant contact, over the small of his back. His skin is sticky and gritty with the salt of his drying sweat. It’s gross and intimate and she likes it immensely.

 _We're friends,_ she’s supposed to remind him, but what she whispers against his mouth instead is, "You're warm." She strokes the pads of her fingers over the ridges of his shoulder blades. "Why do you get so warm?"

His hands press into her back.

"I don't know."

* * *

She allows herself to look at him, and then she can't stop.

He shines in the midday heat of a Thursday at the end of July, coming out of the water after swimming laps with the kids.

“You should do the Island swim this year, Josh.” Neville offers a high five as the boy hoists himself onto the dock. “You just did twelve laps. You can totally do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Definitely,” Neville says.

Pansy has become convinced that Josh can only smirk, but the smile he gives to Neville is wide and real.

It's nothing, only kindness, which is _easy_ for Neville. It’s not a feat.

Behind her Ray-Bans, Pansy is livid with want.

In the boat shed, she leans into his body.

“We’re friends,” she tells his lips and his hands, and his soft, downturned eyes.

“I know.”

“Why do you taste so good?”

“I don’t know.”

* * *

Pansy snaps her Bubble Yum and looks at the face of her watch.

It's eleven o'clock on a Friday night, which means nothing. There's nothing to do, and no place to go. There's no reason she should care.

She's resigned herself to lying in her bunk most nights, flipping through yellowed Peanuts comics anthologies and the collection of musty 1960s MAD Magazine paperback books jumbled in a wooden crate behind the door of the cabin.

Fleur leans on one elbow and stares into space, a serious, important novel open to its title page on her bed. Daphne and Padma sit hip to hip on Padma's bunk, sharing a set of headphones, each with a faded issue of National Geographic spread out across her thighs.

Pansy sits up. Then she flips her legs over the side of the bed, slips her bare feet into her Keds, hooks her flashlight around her wrist, and walks out the door without a word.

She gets her fill of wood smoke every night helping kids smash blackened marshmallows between graham crackers at the fire pit next to the lake. The appeal of doing it again in the clandestine woods with booze and weed has escaped her until now.

She walks with her flashlight off past the last set of cabins, takes the path around the lake to the east, then leaves it to pick her way along a deer trail, following the sound of an acoustic guitar.

In the center of a clearing, a fire pops and whines, circled by people half lit with orange light and half hidden in the dark. The unlit spaces are punctuated by the gleam of firelight on red plastic cups and beer cans, pinpoints of lit cigarette ends, and the sustained flare of a joint.

The shadows are heavy, and it takes a moment for Pansy to figure out who’s there. When she does, there’s evidence of the folly of Hermione’s abstinence speech everywhere.

Camp may be about memories, but being young is clearly about sex.

There’s Cho, sitting across Cormac’s thighs with his head resting against her shoulder and his fingertips stroking the inside of her calf, and Ginny, on the ground between Blaise’s open legs, her elbows draped over his knees.

Hermione herself sits with her back against a fallen tree, watching Charlie Weasley play his guitar, and the look on her face is not about scrapbook memories and whittling roasting sticks.

There’s Neville, too, in a folding aluminum beach chair, a can of Coke resting on his knee, and Lavender in a matching chair beside him, leaning against his arm.

Pansy walks up to the fire with the sleeves of her cardigan drawn over her hands.

“Hey!” Charlie’s finished one song and fiddles between chords, thinking about his next. There’s something amiable and comfortable about him, like you’d tell him all your secrets if you spent too much time with him, or start dressing like him. “Come have a seat.”

Pansy shoves her fists, still inside her sleeves, in her pockets. “Thanks.”

Neville sits up taller in his chair. “Hey, Pans.” The expression on his face is unreadable in the dark.

“Hey.” She sits on a stump stool and crosses her sweater tight over her body. She declines the beer she’s offered, and then the joint.

The conversation flows around the edges of Charlie’s guitar, quiet and indistinct, and Pansy follows it idly, watching a new log catch and burn.

Charlie twists a tuning peg, strums through a few chords, then starts playing "Hallelujah." It’s a pretty song, and Pansy means to stay for it, but Lavender gets up to get another beer. When she comes back, she settles in Neville’s lap.

“Hey—” he says.

Pansy stands. “I’m going to go down to the lake,” she tells no one in particular. “Goodnight.” She waves a hand over her shoulder as she leaves, and it doesn’t matter at all that Lavender’s is the loudest and friendliest reply.

“Goodnight!” Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s trying for and getting what you want, but she sounds content.

It’s a full moon. Pansy makes her way along the deer trail with her flashlight turned off and dangling from her wrist.

She hasn't been this angry with herself since March and the rejection letters. She's angry, and angry for being angry, and she feels like an idiot, which makes her angry, too.

It's what she gets for kissing Perseus in the boat shed.

Before she rejoins the path around the lake, she hears the dry snap of a broken twig behind her.

“Pans?”

It’s Neville.

She slows down, and lets him fall in beside her.

They reach the lake trail without talking, and instead of following it west back to camp, Pansy turns right and goes east. The woods open up as they approach the lake, and the moonlight streaming through the branches of the pines illuminates the striations of their bark in complete detail. She can see the silver surface of the water shining through the gaps in the shrubs.

Pansy follows another path when it branches toward a postage stamp stretch of beach. It’s crowded by reeds and studded with rocks, but a section of log sits at its edge to act as a bench. From here, the view stretches west down the length of the lake. The feathered branches of the great hemlock on the Island dip and sway in silhouette against the moon.

She sits, and Neville sits down beside her.

“Hey.” He rubs his fingers in the fabric at the elbow of Pansy’s sweater.

She breathes in deep, and pushes it back out. “Hey.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and Pansy starts to think that he won’t.

“Are you upset?” he asks finally.

Pansy stiffens. “No. Why would I be upset?”

“I thought that—”

“Have you been going out to the campfire every night?” She keeps it light and easy. She's making conversation.

He sighs, leans forward, and picks up a stone, then draws back his arm and sends it skimming over the surface of the lake. Pansy counts five jumps before it skitters and then sinks.

“Not every night. But I like to listen to Charlie play guitar. He's really great. Just, in general.” He picks up another stone, and holds it in his fist. “And I’ve been having a hard time sleeping.”

“Why?” 

He doesn't answer her. He looks down at the stone in his fist, and then up again. “I didn’t want Lavender to do that. And she doesn't. I don't let her do things like that."

Pansy finds a rock of her own, small and oval, thicker on one end than it is on the other. “You can let her do whatever you want. We’re just friends.”

He’s still and silent for a while, then says, “I know.”

“You could sleep with her if you wanted to.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s fine if you already have.” Pansy rolls the stone in her fingers. “It’s none of my business.” She pulls back her arm and throws her rock. It cuts into the water at an angle and sinks.

“I haven’t done anything with Lavender.” Neville reaches over and tucks Pansy’s hair behind her ear. “I don’t want to do anything with anyone else.”

“Why not?" Pansy picks up a stone and throws it straight into the lake. "She wears birthday cake flavored lip balm."

Neville looks confused.

"She probably tastes like _cake_ ," Pansy explains. "And maybe you don't know this, but she can actually put her ankles behind her—”

Before she can finish, Neville leans forward. His kiss lands on the corner of her mouth, but it’s warm and deliberate.

"I love the way you taste," he says, and then he shows her that he means it.

Pansy tries to wrap her arms around him, but they’re sitting side by side and the contact between them is incomplete and unsatisfying. She swings her knee over his thighs and settles in his lap.

She's used to tipping up on her toes and looping her arms around his waist, but now she cradles his head in her arms and kisses him, clutching handfuls of his hair.

They both gasp, sharp and surprised, when she shifts forward and her body connects decisively with his through layers of fabric.

The first time she rolls her hips against him is an accident, but the counterpressure feels so urgent and inevitable that she does it again on purpose. After that, she doesn’t want to stop.

“Pansy . . .”

She pushes down a little more. It feels good, and she does it again.

“Please." He grips his fingers into her hips. "You're—” He cuts himself off with an involuntary begging sound in the back of his throat. His fingers relax, and he kisses her again.

She repeats the rolling motion against him, over and over again, tugging at his hair.

“Pansy, _please._ ” His hands run over her body like he doesn’t know what to do with them, smoothing over her back and hovering at the sides of her ribs. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to—"

"Do you want me to stop?"

He shivers, and half a minute stretches out where she slows and finally stalls before he says, "No."

His hands stroke at her hair, then his thumbs press softly at her jaw. She moves, and keeps moving. When he kisses her it feels like he's never thought of kissing anyone else in the whole of his life.

Good, kind, lovely . . .

“Neville.” Her eyes open wide.

It's the strong punctuation at the end of a phrase.

She pulls his hair and whines quietly into his open mouth, and he gasps like something's been broken that can’t be fixed. His hands fall to her hips and he drags her hard to himself, arcing up against her with a groan.

There's a sense of suspended animation between them, just pressure and fulfillment, then his unfocused mouth lands kisses blindly, lazily, on her jaw. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that he’s warm, and his warmth is perfect. She shifts against him, slack and lethargic, while his hands wander under her t-shirt, over the bare skin of her back.

“Pansy?” he whispers.

“Mmmm.”

"I'm sorry."

She doesn't know what he's apologizing for.

“Are we still friends?”

“Mmm hmm.”

His palms flow one after the other over the ridges of her backbone. “Just friends?”

She draws her hands through his hair. “Just friends.”

She kisses him for a long time, and he kisses her back. The mosquitoes hum to the thin and far-off accompaniment of Charlie's guitar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are always greatly appreciated.
> 
> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

When a front of stacked grey clouds rolls in the following afternoon, Pansy blows her whistle and calls the swimmers in.

Neville rows out alone in a canoe to round up the boaters out of view around the Island, and they coast into the dock as the sky opens up.

Pansy helps the kids out of their boats and life jackets and sends them up to their cabins, and by the time she's finished, her hair streams into her face.

“Go!” Neville shouts and laughs from his belly while they haul in the boats, rain trailing from his clothes and body and pouring from inside the canoes until there's standing water on the gravel floor of the boat shed. Pansy shrieks as she runs from the shed to the lake and back again, hands slipping on the slick edges of the canoes, and she nearly drops her end every time. Neville’s eyes wrinkle at the corners while he laughs at that, too.

“You’re soaked,” he says once they’ve finished.

It’s dark inside the boat shed. Outside the door the rain comes down in sheets, fogging the view up the rise to the Lodge, accompanied by white flashes of lightning and operatic rattling rolls of thunder.

“We got it all in just in time.” Neville, looking out the doorway, lifts the hem of his saturated shirt and wipes the water from his eyes.  
Pansy breathes in audibly, and he turns to look at her.

His smile has no artfulness to it.

“What?” he asks.

He doesn’t know how beautiful he is. He will, someday soon, but he doesn’t yet.

“Nothing.” She swipes a drop of water from her chin.

He has a short row of friendship bracelets around his left wrist—the wide, complex ones in neon and pastel, and a pair of inexpertly woven four-strand braids, all gifts from nervous girls.

The pale stretch of thigh below the hem of his too-small shorts has been erased by the sun.

He moves in close, and pushes the hair out of her eyes. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” she lies. His white t-shirt is plastered to his skin. Pansy reaches out and runs her fingertips from his navel down to the waistband of his shorts.

He breathes in sharply.

“Pansy.” It’s not an invitation.

She pulls her hand back toward herself. “What?”

He runs a hand through his dripping hair.

“I don’t—" His Adam’s apple moves as he swallows. "I don't want to be friends.”

She takes half a step away from him. “What?”

“I mean, I want to be friends. I’ll always want to be friends.” He looks like his old, uncertain self. “But I can’t . . .”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t do what we did last night if we’re _just_ friends.”

Her physical reaction to the memory of dragging her body against his is immediate and overwhelming.

The last thing she wants is to want him so bad that it hurts.

But she does.

“We _are_ just friends,” she says. She half expects Josh to pop his head through the door and point and laugh at her, yell “No you’re not!” then run off to throw an oar in the lake.

“I don’t do what we did with friends,” he says. “Pansy, I’ve only kissed three girls. Including you.”

Her lizard hindbrain wants to know who the fuck else he’s kissed and when and why and how.

_Mine._

The word arrives like an uninvited guest that intends to get comfortable, and it makes her take another half-step back.

Something that she wants, monumental and wholly unearned, stands waiting right in front of her. But the _wanting_ itself, clear and uncompromisingly specific, is so horrifying that she'd happily be canyons away from it.

“Okay,” she says, and she shrugs. “If you don’t want to do it, we won’t.”

She’s never seen a look more devastated than the one he gives her.

“I want to. So bad. I can’t emphasize that part enough.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s just that I like you." The water still drips off of him. "More than that, actually.”

“What?” Pansy feels like she’s going to pass out. She has an intense and incongruous desire for a piece of Bubble Yum.

“I’ve wanted you since we were kids." His eyebrows knit together. "You know that, right?"

She stares at him and doesn't move an inch.

He looks down at his soaked Vans, and then back up. His cheeks are flushed pink. “But I can't touch you like I did last night if it doesn’t mean anything to you. It's too hard for me."

The worst part about it is that she does know.

She’s been eating M&Ms during movie nights at the Lodge and shooting arrows and piloting canoes with Neville Longbottom since the summer between the fourth and fifth grades, and she’s well fucking aware that he’s liked her.

He's liked her for years.

She knew it on the morning of his twelfth birthday, when she turned to pass him a squeeze bottle of artificially flavored syrup so he could douse his Bisquick pancakes and caught a look on his face she’d never seen on anyone before.

She's been wanted since, of course, enough times to learn that the greater the want, the faster she runs in the opposite direction.

It was fine when it was Neville. She didn't _mind_ , not for the long years of his indefinable lumpiness.

But without asking if it was alright _,_ he went and became mythological and learned how to kiss.

Now Pansy has strong, persistent feelings about his hands and his wrists and the parts of him that are covered by his shorts and the way her arms fit perfectly around him. She thinks, with complete seriousness, that she’s going to throw a red Solo cup at the next person who sits in his lap while Charlie Weasley plays Leonard Cohen around a campfire.

She’s in love with Neville fucking Longbottom, obviously, and she’s so wildly terrified and catastrophically angry about it that she can't see straight.

She walks right past him and straight out of the boat shed.

The rain pelts down while she walks up to the Lodge, and she’s soaked again.

“Pansy?” Neville calls after her.

“No,” she shouts back over her shoulder. “You’re too wet.”

* * *

At four o'clock, she plays Uno and paints French tips the color of Easter eggs with a chattering group of eleven year-old girls in Eagle cabin while the storm wears itself out.

Five o'clock is dinner time.

She refuses to look at Neville, sitting in her field of vision at the next table over. The weather is still drippy and morose, but he’s showered and dry. He looks so clean and inviting wearing his navy blue U sweatshirt that she can’t bring herself to eat a bite of her tater tot casserole.

At ten o’clock, knowing that he doesn’t want to slide between Lavender’s thighs after all is no comfort when the rain keeps everyone inside. In the counselors’ cabin, Lavender rattles on about someone named Antonin.

“He’s Russian,” she says, slicking a coin of pear-scented lotion over one bronzed and freshly shaved shin.

“Who’s Russian?” asks Daphne from her bunk. “I thought you were trying to deflower Neville.”

Lavender looks at Pansy. “No, I’m not."

Pansy grabs her toiletry bag, jams her feet in her slides, and heads to the bathrooms to brush her teeth for a superfluous second time.

Her mouth is full of Aquafresh foam when Lavender creeps meekly around the bathroom door and sits on the edge of the next sink over.

“I’m _so_ sorry,” Lavender says. “You said you weren’t into him. I never would have tried if I’d known.”

Pansy spits ruthlessly and splashes the inside of the sink to wash it down. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The look on Lavender’s face is an unholy alliance between pity and affection, of all things, and Pansy keeps her eyes trained on the fogged bathroom mirror, searching for zits she doesn't have.

“Okay.” Lavender waves her hand dismissively. “But how is he? I’ll bet he’s a great kisser. Nice guys always are. They try so hard.”

“What the fuck, Lavender?”

Lavender shrugs, then starts back in on the Russian. “So he’s not from Russia, but he _speaks_ Russian.”

“Is he sexually attracted to the Swiss Miss?”

Lavender laughs hard all the way back to the cabin like they're friends, and gives herself the hiccups. By the time she takes it upon herself to climb onto Pansy’s bunk and lay out a Tarot reading, Pansy decides to go looking for a glass of lemonade in the Lodge.

There isn’t any, which is why she’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the stainless steel work counter in the dark industrial kitchen of the mess hall at eleven o'clock. Percy Weasley flicks on the bank of fluorescent lights closest to the door and finds her sixteen spoons deep into a plastic gallon bucket of ice cream marked Party Size on the side in red balloon letters. 

“I see you've made a friend."

"This is Party Size,” she says. “We're more than friends. Things are getting pretty serious between us."

Percy actually laughs, which is novel. “I’m very happy for you. I’ll write your name on that since you’ve decided to start eating directly out of the container.”

He leans against the counter across from her, and watches her lick at her seventeenth spoonful.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Pansy gives him a look.

“I didn’t think so. Is it an exclusive relationship?” He indicates the ice cream.

Pansy shrugs. "It doesn't have to be."

He turns around to fish a spoon out of the drawer behind him, then digs a massive spoonful out of the party bucket.

“Oh, come on,” says Pansy. “That’s not a bite, that’s a scoop.”

“Try growing up with six siblings and then show me how slowly you eat ice cream.” He does eat it slowly, though. Thoughtfully. “Everything alright down at the lake? Anything I can help you with?”

“You mean besides Band-Aids?” Pansy pulls up a spoonful even bigger than Percy’s.

“You’re good on Band-Aids," he says.

Pansy nods.

“So this problem you're not drowning in a bucket of ice cream—let's say it's about college." He looks at her carefully through his horn-rimmed glasses. "Is this a rejection issue or an acceptance issue?"

She narrows her eyes. “People have acceptance issues?"

“Yes. They do.”

“Have you had them?” she asks.

"In a way.”

“You got into the law school you wanted.”

“Did I?"

She jabs at his spoon as it approaches but he parries, breaks through with a return thrust low on the inside, and hauls up another scoop.

“What if you were invited to a law school, and you didn’t want to go?” Pansy moves the bucket closer to herself.

“I’d decline. Clearly and firmly and with an untroubled conscience.”

“And what if you were accepted,” she says, “but you hadn’t even applied?”

“This law school just throws the doors open for me?”

“Yes.”

Percy folds his arms over his chest. “I suppose I’d never thought about this particular school." He glances at her then looks away. "Maybe I wasn’t thinking about school at all. So it catches me off guard." He licks away a drip inching along the handle of his spoon. "I'm clearly the sort of person who particularly hates being caught off guard. Does it turn out that I like the school?”

Pansy slides the empty bowl of her spoon between her lips. “Yes.”

“A lot?”

“It’s the best one.”

“I see.” His next lunge is blindingly fast, and her defense is entirely unequal to it. “But I'm hesitating. I wonder . . . if I'm worried that I’m unprepared for this school. That I'll flunk out.”

Pansy freezes.

"Hmm." Percy regards her. "If I did feel like that, I think it would be helpful to consider that not attending at all is functionally the same as flunking out.”

"But without the wasted time."

"Or the risk of a bruised ego."

Pansy glares at him.

Percy bites his ice cream thoughtfully. "I'd also forgo any of the potential rewards of that experience."

“What if you’d already told the school you didn’t want to go? Repeatedly?”

Percy laughs again. “I’m sure it would let me change my mind. It sounds like this school is very interested in matriculating me.”

Pansy's cheeks warm. “I expect you to put my name on this.” She gestures at Party Size.

“I will. And mine as well. We're all involved.”

Pansy slaps the lid onto the bucket and accepts Percy’s hand as she hops down off the counter.

He takes the bucket from her. “I'd also try to not forget that if it’s not working out, I can always take a break. Change schools. Drop out and go backpacking around Southeast Asia. Nothing’s set in stone. I'd remember that I'm very young.”

She turns around halfway to the door. “You _are_ young, you know.”

“I suppose.” Percy's smile is a bit weary. “Anything else?”

“Don’t eat any of that unless I’m here.”

His eyebrows lift. “Ground rules. Okay.”

“Mmm. You’re out of lemonade by the way.”

"You mean my personal container? With my name on it?"

"Yes."

* * *

At midnight there’s a dim light on inside the boys’ counselor’s cabin. Pansy knocks lightly enough on the back door that she half hopes no one hears. Draco answers, shirtless and a little sweaty with his hair mashed up on one side like he’s been hard asleep.

“It’s nice to see you at camp,” she says. “I didn’t realize you’d joined us this year.”

He rolls his eyes and holds up four fingers. “I made four macaroni necklaces today. They’re beautiful.”

“I’m sure none of the other kids made better ones.” She tightens her cardigan around herself and narrows her eyes. “You look pleased with yourself. What else have you been doing besides macaroni necklaces?”

“Is there something I can get for you? I don’t have any nail polish remover.”

Pansy’s jaw tightens.

“Well?” Draco's impatient. Pansy notes that he looks suspiciously well-fed but under-rested.

“Longbottom, your girl’s out back,” says Blaise from inside the cabin, and Pansy nearly takes off at a run straight through the trees.

Before she can move, Neville stands in the doorway behind Draco, in boxer shorts, pulling on a t-shirt. His hair is a wreck, disheveled and overgrown. "Did you want me?" he asks, looking at Pansy.

“Yeah, she wants you.” Draco slaps Neville’s shoulder. “Good luck with that, man.”

“You were asleep. I’ll go.” Pansy turns to walk away.

“No, don’t,” says Neville, pulling the door shut behind him and walking down the back steps of the cabin. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“It’s midnight. You should be asleep.”

“Yeah. Why are you up?”

Pansy thinks about Party Size and wipes at her lip with her sleeve. “I was going for a walk.”

“At midnight?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I wanted lemonade and Lavender was trying to read my fortune.”

“Yeah, she’ll do that.” Neville looks at her patiently.

“I just came by—” Pansy stops. She hasn’t the slightest idea what she came by to say, _exactly_ , other than that she’s been thinking a lot about law school. Now that Neville’s right in front of her, all she can hold in her mind is boxer shorts.

“I’m glad,” says Neville.

“You’re glad what?”

“That you came by.” He claps a mosquito out of the air in front of his face.

Neither of them says anything for a moment.

“Do you need anything?” Neville asks.

“She needs your dick, bro,” says Blaise from inside the cabin. “Pansy, tell him you need his dick. I’m sure Neville will be happy to give it to you, then we can all go to sleep.”

Neville flushes pink from his chest to the tips of his ears.

“I don’t want your dick,” says Pansy irritably.

Neville looks both relieved and crestfallen.

“I do,” she says quickly. “I want your dick.” She shakes her head and twists her hands in her cardigan pockets. "What you said before. That’s what I want.”

“Dick!” says Blaise.

“Shut the fuck up, Blaise,” Pansy shouts, loud enough to carry.

Neville looks at the screened rear window of the cabin then back to Pansy. “What I said before when?”

“In the boat shed.”

“Oh.” Neville thinks for a moment. “Do you mean—”

Pansy's heart starts hammering industriously against the wall of her ribs. “I don’t want to be friends."

The look on Neville's face makes her heart drop everything.

"Okay," he says. "If that's what you want."

"No!” She takes her hands out of her pockets and steps toward him. “I mean in the other way.”

“She wants dick," says Blaise. "I don't know why this is taking so long."

Neville's confused, but then he says, “Oh,” and then, "Oh!" and then he looks at her like she’s hand-delivered Christmas morning in August. “ _Pans._ ”

“Just fucking kiss already,” Draco says, whining at them through the window. “Kiss tenderly and quickly and don’t let any fucking mosquitoes in when you come back inside. I'm not rubbing calamine lotion on Zabini, no matter how nicely he asks.”

But Neville’s got it covered, and before Draco reaches the part about the mosquitoes, he closes the distance between himself and Pansy, wraps his arms around her middle and lifts her off the ground.

“I like kissing you,” she says, breathless and earnest against his mouth. "You're not my friend.”

“I like kissing you, too. So much."

He holds her tight, but she wraps her legs around his waist and loops her arms around his neck anyway, and he turns and presses her shoulders to the back wall of the cabin.

Pansy sighs, soft and triumphant. He’s between _her_ thighs. _Her_ ankles are hooked at the small of his back.

The connection between their bodies is incomplete and chaste but their mouths are employed in glorious debauchery. She tastes him— _savors_ him—and his hands clench hard in the back of her cardigan.

“ _Mine,_ ” she whispers, and he breathes in relief.

“They’re not talking anymore.” Pansy hears the sound of shuffling, then Blaise at the window screen. “Get that dick!”

“Don't be a jackass," Draco says, yawning. “They're virgins.”

* * *

“Are you ready to head back?” Neville runs his warm, dry palm down her shin.

Tucked up in his lap in the folding aluminum chair next to the campfire in the woods, Pansy sighs. Charlie finished changing the tuning of his guitar a moment ago and has started in on Bob Dylan. Her legs and arms and face feel committed to the radiant heat of the fire, but she nods.

They walk back to camp, and where the trail divides, she pulls him close.

Their geometry is satisfying and complete. He’s smooth where she’s sharp, and she’s hard where he’s soft, and her hand folds neatly into his.

“Good night,” he whispers, which is her favorite game.

“Good night,” she says back, but her shoulders keep scraping against pine bark.

No one is going to bed.

“Can I touch you?” She slides her fingers down his shirt and over the depression of his navel.

He pauses, then kisses her for a while, then comes up for air.

“Okay," he says, and she slips her hand into his shorts.

Her touch is explorational, cautiously appreciative of how hard he is in some ways and how soft he is in others, but no matter how she runs her hand over him, he makes sounds against her mouth that feel like they’re just for her.

“Stop. _Please._ ” He's flushed and breathing hard. She stops, right away, even though she wants to hear the sounds he'll make when she keeps going.

“When?” She circles her fingers over his navel.

“It’s not a when thing. _At all_." He rests his forehead against hers. "It’s more _where."_

"Not here?"

He shakes his head.

“Don’t you guys have a system in your cabin?” Her hand drifts under the hem of his t-shirt and she lays her palm flat over his belly. “You put that awful piano tie on the front door when someone has a girl over?”

“Yeah, but”—he looks pained—“it’s not nice in there. It smells like socks.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

She pulls him down by the back of his neck and kisses him. Her angles are impolite, her hips pushing hard against his thigh.

"I'll think," he says. "I promise."

* * *

The walls of the boat shed are predictably rough.

"Have you thought about it?" she asks.

She's led his hands over the fabric of the top of her two piece swimsuit for the better part of a week, and today, finally, below it.

"Yes _._ " His eyes are foggy, watching his hand beneath the red fabric of her suit as it strokes at the nonexistent swell of her breast. "I've thought about it."

"When?"

"Saturday," he says, absent and absorbed.

"That's six days." She's petulant. "Do you promise?"

"I promise." He draws his hand out from her top and smooths it down over her belly. "Can I touch you?"

"Yes."

His fingers tremble past the waistband of her suit.

He leans in and breathes in the sweat-and-sunscreen scent at her neck.

"Do you know what you like?" he asks, his voice low and quiet. He kisses the skin below her ear. "Could you tell me?"

Her cheeks flare.

"No." It's the barest whisper, like she doesn't want him to hear.

He does something with the pads of his fingers, light and gentle.

"That," she says, and her chest heaves. "I like that."

* * *

“I want to touch you again.” She’s losing her mind to his fingertips. He's spent days patiently, she'd almost say systematically, learning what makes her mind go blank. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m not complicated.”

“And I am?”

“Yes.”

* * *

"When on Saturday?" She's being demanding, but can't stop herself.

He smiles against the lobe of her ear. "After the dance."

She sits in the dark between Neville's legs on the dock, facing the lake. Their feet make a row in the water: his, hers, hers, his.

"Not after." She sucks in a breath and digs her fingernails into the skin of his forearm. "Oh!"

He repeats what he just did. "This?"

" _Yes._ "

"If we don't go to the dance we'll miss out on—"

"We'll stay for one song," she says.

"Alright. One song." His wrist flexes and turns under the unbuttoned placket of her shorts. "Is it still good?" He hasn't changed a thing.

And it's good.

It's so good she can't speak.

* * *

On Saturday afternoon, Pansy pours her impatience into eye shadow and lip gloss.

She builds up a soft peach eye, defines her lids with black liner, blends the edges, and runs her blush brush over the tops of her cheekbones and into her temples. She applies a frosted pink to her lips, then wipes it off and tries a matte dusty rose, then goes back to the pink. Then she wipes it all off and starts again.

Once she’s made up her own face three times, she turns her pencils and brushes on anyone else within reach.

Pansy assaults Ginny with glitter, accepts that Fleur is too perfect for make-up and probably this world, and then breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth to steady her hand while she defines Millie’s eyelids with liquid black liner.

“Look up. All the way to the ceiling.” Pansy has to clean up the line with a cotton swab. Once Millie’s eyes are done, she swirls her brush into the powder compact, blows the excess into the air and sets it all.

“Perfect. Oliver’s going to lose his mind.”

Millie looks skeptical. “Is it too much?”

“No." Pansy shakes her head. "It’s really natural. You have amazing eyes, I just made them pop.”

Millie frowns. "That sounds awful."

Pansy hands Millie her lipstick.

"Well?" Millie asks.

It's a great red. It looks great. Millie's _great._

Pansy steps back to take it all in. "If he doesn't have that all over his face by the end of the night, _Vogue_ has been lying to me for my entire life."

Once Pansy's run out of cosmetics victims, she gathers up the girls from Snake cabin and walks them over to the Lodge.

They twist streamers, drape them in long arches and hang them in strings over the doorways while the older boys drag rectangular folding tables out of the supply room and set them up along the wall.

Pansy is nearly as fluent in the act of decorating as she is at doing make-up. It's easy and meditative and soothing, and in this moment of profound anxiety, she's grateful for the presence of tablecloths and the pleasing quandaries of bowl placement. Getting the stage curtain to close all the way provides ten minutes of welcome distraction, but the main doorway to the auditorium stubbornly remains the most interesting place in the room.

She still somehow misses him when he comes in.

“Hey, Pans.” She’s just settled a gallon bucket of ice cream that doesn't have her name written on it into a wide bowl of ice cubes when he steps in close behind her.

She has to take a breath before she turns around.

He’s clean and combed, and not wearing a bandana. His light blue button-up shirt and his non-pleated navy blue pants fit him perfectly. He probably bought them new just for camp.

“You look really beautiful,” he says.

She looks down at her halter dress. It’s blue with small peach and yellow flowers that she echoed with her eye make-up. The straps are thin and the hem reaches the middle of her thighs. “Thanks. You look really . . . clean."

He looks beautiful, too.

He goes off to help the Lion cabin boys set up darts and table tennis in the activity room off the auditorium.

After all of her waiting she can’t look at him. And she can’t look away.

Justin Finch-Fletchley, natty in a white short-sleeved button-up shirt and a teal sequined bow tie, sets up his turntables at the DJ booth he’s improvising with a folding table. He hauls in a massive box of LPs, then plugs in cords, checks connections and adjusts a pair of speaker cabinets on tripod stands, and Pansy wants to scream at him from her place next to the ice cream to get out his records and play one single fucking song.

Neville comes close but then so does Charlie Weasley. Then because Charlie Weasley is clearly the love of Neville's fucking life she has to be content to know that he's standing right behind her with his back toward her while they talk about Neville's major. She's not expecting it when he reaches back and hooks his left pinky finger around hers while he's talking to Charlie, and the hidden contact, slight and secret between their bodies and the tables beside them, makes her want to yank him out of the room before the music starts and insist on being pressed to the back wall of a cabin.

By the time Justin drops the needle on the Footloose soundtrack, Neville’s been pulled away by Cedric to investigate Josh's involvement with a pair of women’s underwear that were hanging from the door handle to the auditorium.

Pansy stands and waits through Kenny Loggins, then watches with amazement while Justin picks up the needle, carefully puts _Footloose_ back in its sleeve, takes out Duran Duran’s _Rio_ and lines up the needle with “Hungry Like the Wolf”. There’s a solid three minutes between songs.

“How are you doing?” Lavender leans next to Pansy at the ice cream table. She stretches out the word “doing”.

“I’m fine. How long is this song?” she asks. “Do you think he’s going to play ‘Rio’ or get another album out?”

“Do you need me to do the bed check for Snake cabin tonight?” Lavender asks.

Pansy’s shoulders tense. “What?”

Lavender tilts toward Pansy and bumps her shoulder against hers. “I’ve got it. Take your time.”

Pansy looks at her. Actually looks at her.

Lavender is smiling, sweet and completely sincere. She’s a nice person, Pansy realizes. Really nice, actually.

“Are you sneaking out again tonight?” Pansy asks.

“I’ll wait until everyone’s gone to bed. Don’t rush, okay?”

Pansy’s heart rate picks up when Neville comes back into the auditorium with Cedric and a contrite Josh.

“You’re really lucky,” says Lavender.

“How so?”

“Guys like him, that are, like, nice and a little dorky, are incredible in bed."

“What the fuck, Lavender?”

"Seriously, they try _so_ hard."

* * *

“Where are we going?” Pansy follows Neville down to the lake, her hand folded inside his.

“You’ll see.”

He’s tied up a canoe at the dock. She rolls her eyes when he insists she wears a life jacket for the short paddle to the Island, but she does.

They pull the canoe up the beach then follow a branch of the trail to the clearing in the center of the Island where kids go to camp out during the summer. It’s swept and tidy and there's a half log bench next to a fire pit, where a stack of dry logs waits ready to be lit. A dozen feet away from the fire is a pitched caution orange tent.

“ _This_ was your idea?” she asks.

“I—” He puts his hand at the back of his neck. “Yeah."

“Because it doesn’t smell like socks?”

“That, and we won’t have to hurry.”

“No piano tie.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

She puts her arms around him and rises up onto her toes, and he kisses her like he did the first time, soft and innocent and with all the feeling that was there that she tried to ignore.

She runs her hand down his belly and over the placket of his pants.

"Pans,” he says, fond and with a bit of a laugh, and he takes her hand. “I thought maybe we could watch the meteor shower for a bit. After."

"After." She grabs him by the belt buckle and drags him toward the tent.

Inside, he’s made up a super heavy inflatable mattress with real sheets in a pink and yellow 1960s floral design—faded, but crisp and clean—with mismatched pillowcases and a striped Hudson's Bay wool blanket. Pansy recognizes it all from the supply closet in the Lodge. It's eclectic and idiosyncratic and a little moth-bitten, but everything is neat and warm-looking, tucked into an orderly square.

It's so perfectly charming and so perfectly _him_ she can't say a word.

She doesn’t look back at him, only kicks off her shoes, crawls over the surprisingly firm surface of the improvised bed, and lies down on her back.

He’s crouched halfway inside the tent, staring at her. 

“Get in here,” she says. "You'll let the mosquitoes in."

He ducks inside and pulls the zipper closed, takes off his shoes and socks, then moves up the bed and lies down next to her.

They kiss, searching and deliberate, and she brings her hands to his belt buckle and starts to undo it.

“Hey,” he says. “We don’t have to hurry.”

“But I want you.”

He laughs. “I picked up on that.” He strokes her abdomen over her dress. “It’s not a race.”

It is, and she wants to win it.

She wants them both to win it. Preferably quickly and relatively close together.

“Let me take it slow this time, Pansy. Please.”

She relents.

He kisses her for what feels like an hour. Finally, he draws the hem of her dress up her thighs, then over her belly. “Does it zip?”

She shakes her head. “It just pulls off.”

They sit up, and he lifts the dress over her head.

She isn’t wearing a bra, and she settles back on the bed in nothing but her cotton underpants in a tiny pink floral print, high-waisted and cut low at the leg, practical for camp. He looks like he’s stopped breathing.

“Pansy.” He lays the palm of his hand between her breasts and leaves it there for a long time before stroking down her chest and over her abdomen, a leisurely, unbroken line of contact. He lifts his hand when it reaches the waistband of her underwear, then places it back over her heart and starts again.

She thinks she’s going to hyperventilate.

He’s kept the ache between her thighs stoked for a week, touching her until she’s incoherent and then leaving her at her cabin door with a kiss.

She’s so turned on she's kind of angry about it, and as she watches her own fingers tremble at the buttons of his shirt, she wonders if that’s been his plan.

He helps pull his shirt off over his shoulders, lets her undo his belt and slide down his zipper, then pushes his pants down his hips and kicks them off the bed.

“That too,” she says, tugging up the hem of his white undershirt, and he laughs again.

“Slow, okay?” he says, and she wants to yell at him that slow is all they’ve been doing.

They need Blaise to referee.

When they’re both down to their underwear, he strokes her belly again, and brushes his open hand over one breast, and then the next.

Then he lowers his mouth and wraps his lips around her nipple.

Pansy gasps.

“Was that a good noise?” he asks without lifting his lips entirely.

She nods, and then all at the same time, he flicks his tongue over her while he grips the other breast in a hand and pinches her nipple, steady and firm.

Pansy practically sits up and clenches her fists in his hair.

He does it again, and once more, and she’s moving anxiously in a disorganized effort to get more—harder, faster, sooner—of what he’s already doing exactly how she wants.

Her hand goes for his boxer shorts, but before she gets there, he rolls over between her legs and his hot, damp mouth places kisses down the center of her chest, her abdomen, around her navel, and over the flat of her belly below it. Pansy thinks she is truly, non-hyperbolically going to hyperventilate when he puts his mouth right over the awful, summer-long ache between her legs.

“Can I take these off?” As he asks, he tucks his fingertips into the waistband of her underwear.

Pansy took Ginny aside the previous afternoon and had a discreet conversation that involved strategies with razors and electric hair trimmers and moisturizer and hypotheticals Pansy refused to clarify. The result is Pansy has no idea if what she did, with extreme caution, while standing on one leg in the shower was the right thing, but she likes it. It looks neat.

“Yes.” She bites at the tip of a fingernail.

Neville draws her underpants down her legs, and Pansy wants to put the look on his face in a scrapbook.

He recovers, and runs his palm down her body again, but this time he doesn’t stop, and slides it between her legs.

He has that absent look, like he’s fully inhabiting a dream. “You’re so beautiful.” His fingers play over her skin with curiosity, which sometimes tickles and makes her hips wriggle. “Can I put my mouth here?”

 _Oh,_ she thinks. _That is a thing that people do._

She takes a solid minute to talk herself into nodding.

“Can you say it out loud?”

“Yes.” In her anxiety she waves a hand with casual imperiousness as if to shoo him back to work.

He doesn't seem to notice, or if he does, he doesn't mind. He nestles down between her legs like he intends to be there for a while, and pushes at her thighs until they fall open to either side.

He looks at her, and for some reason he sighs.

 _So this is nakedness_ , Pansy thinks, but then he stamps tiny, tender kisses around but not _on_ her fully exposed and freshly trimmed self, and by the time his mouth makes contact with her, she’s so ready for it she actually says, "Yes," flat and businesslike, like a teacher agreeing to accept a late paper.

He does a kind of pulse with his tongue and she nearly screams.

Her first coherent thought is that she has wildly underestimated him. She suspects his reasons for insisting on a bed of real linens on an island were myriad, but she’s profoundly grateful that he isn’t summoning these sounds from her in a room that smells like socks.

His _mouth_.

She already knew about this interpersonal practice in theory, and this, above all things, should be unbearably awkward. But it’s not. It’s glorious, and she’s so worked up she takes the hair at the sides of his head in her fists like a pair of very short reins and tries not to yank on them.

She lifts her head, unable to stop watching what he’s doing. He tests and tries and tilts his eyes up toward her face, following her reactions. She's shocked and fascinated to realize that his hips are pushing against the mattress while he does it. It's so surprising that this would turn him on that she watches his body, absorbed, until she’s startled by the sensation of his fingertip.

“Is this okay?” he asks. She wants to tell him yes, it’s all okay, it’s why she’s here, but she realizes that it’s okay because he’s the sort of person who has to ask.

“Yes. Please.”

He slips into her with steady pressure. Something about the way her body tenses at the incursion makes him groan, and his hips jerk forward like they did the second time they kissed.

“Does this feel good?”

She nods.

“It doesn’t hurt?” He withdraws his finger almost entirely, and when he presses it inside again his eyes briefly roll back.

Her whole body flares because he _knows,_ he obviously knows. The entire enterprise is outlandish, a silly team exercise in what it means to be an animal on Earth, like licking another person’s tongue only worse, and no, it doesn’t hurt, it feels fucking incredible.

“It feels good.”

He sighs appreciatively, and in another moment she feels the strain of a second finger.

“And this?”

That feels good, too.

More than good.

What she says is “Neville,” as she tugs at his reins.

Tension twists between her thighs at the entirely new sensation of pressure from inside and the light, repetitive pulsing of his tongue, and that's it. Pansy is now thrilled to go to the U, where she is going to major in Neville putting his mouth between her legs.

Her need and anticipation compound until it's the same intensity of expectation that gathers before a sneeze, but when her thighs clamp shut over his ears, he takes his mouth away, slides his fingers out, and sits up.

His cheeks are bright pink, and his hair looks wild, sticking out in two tufts at either side where she's been pulling on it.

For a moment he's motionless. She’s laid out in front of him, and she knows that her chest and cheeks are flushed. She’s breathing hard. He seems stuck on the image of her like that, bare, with her thighs falling open to the bed.

“I’m going to—” he starts, then stops. “Just a second.”

Still in his boxers, he shifts out from between Pansy’s legs, and she turns on her side to watch him search in a backpack next to the bed. When he comes back, he’s holding a foil-wrapped condom.

She arches an eyebrow. “You brought condoms to camp?”

His eyes open in surprise. “Oh, no, I went into town with Cedric and bought some.”

“When?”

He blushes harder. “The morning after we, um.” He clears his throat. “At the lake.”

It’s her turn to blush.

He doesn’t put it on, though, just sets it down on the bed near the pillows and lies on his side facing her. He pets and strokes her side for ages, watching his hand drift over the curve of her hip.

After a while he picks up the condom again, looks at it thoughtfully, then looks at her. “Pansy, I have to ask.”

She tenses, and she's quiet for a long time. “I haven’t. But you knew that.”

"Yeah," he says. "I did."

Then she says the hard part. “You have.”

He lays his hand over her heart again, and when he looks at her, his face is full of so much tenderness she has to look over his shoulder and out the window of the tent. “I had a girlfriend for over a year.” He draws his hand down and leaves it, warm, on her belly.

“Do you still have a girlfriend?” she asks, even though she doesn’t want to. “Or maybe you're on a break, and when you get to the U, you'll—”

“No. No, of course not.” He closes the short distance between them and presses his mouth to hers, chaste and reassuring, then pulls back. “We broke up before I came to camp. We can talk about it if you want, but all that matters to me is that I’m here with you. You’re the only person I’m thinking about right now.”

Pansy puts on her best unbothered face and shrugs. “At least one of us knows what they’re doing.” She dips her finger into his navel. “And I guess this is a pretty unique setting. It’s not like you’ll forget the time you had sex in a tent on the Island on camp dance night.”

His eyes open in disbelief, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything. “Pans, I—” He shakes his head. “I never in a million years thought this would happen. I’d embarrass myself if I told you how much it matters to me. We’re not just doing this here because Blaise pounds on the back door of the cabin when Cho and Cormac take too long.”

“And there's the issue with the socks.”

“It smells like gorillas in there.” He gets a faraway look on his face. “Worse, probably.”

She kisses him, then, because she doesn’t know what else to do with the intensity of her affection, and when she hooks her thumbs in the waistband of his boxer shorts, he doesn’t stop her. She pushes them over his hips and he takes them down the rest of the way, kicking them off his ankles over the side of the bed.

Pansy has kissed six boys and truly enjoyed it with two of them. She’s never gone past groping over clothes with anyone but Neville. She reads _Cosmo_ , so it's not like she doesn’t know all the relevant anatomy and what to expect, but she can’t help her impulse to look while she smooths her hand over his chest and down his belly.

She wants to touch him like he’s been touching her, but when she circles her palm up and over him he sucks in a breath through his teeth and closes his eyes. He takes her hand in his. “Please don’t. I’m already—” He searches for the words to explain. “I’m really worked up. I don’t want to not be able to do this.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be.”

He leans in and doesn’t take his mouth away from hers when he reaches for the condom, or when he tears it open, and he only pauses for a moment while he rolls it on. Pansy tries to appreciate his fluency.

Once he’s ready, he pulls her whole body flush to his, and buries his face in her neck, mouthing at her skin. She hooks her leg over his hip.

“Now,” she whispers. “ _Please_.”

“I need you to tell me if it doesn’t feel good,” he says, close at her ear. “Right away.”

Pansy nods.

“Will you say it? Out loud? I have to know you’ll say it.”

“Okay. I will.”

He grabs her around the middle and rolls over to his back, turning her with him so that she ends up straddling his waist.

He sits up on his elbows.

“You’ll be in control like this. Is it okay?”

“Yes.” 

They kiss some more—lots of kissing, _all_ the kissing—and while they do, Pansy thinks. She knows the basic mechanics of what needs to happen, but the etiquette of actually getting another person’s body inside your own remains opaque.

Do you just grab it? Does he?

Neville seems to understand and steps in.

“Lift up a bit.” He pushes at her hip until she sits up on her knees, takes himself in the other hand and positions them both. It becomes evident all she needs to do is let gravity do its job.

Pansy’s been prepared by romance novels and anecdotes and the male narrative of conquest for the possibility of pain. She lowers herself just a little, as a test, and sighs with relief. There’s no gate crashing, veil rending, or other artful euphemisms for hurting. No one tears her bud from its stem. She’s safe and comfortable and tingly in a very nice way, and because she wants him more than a bit desperately, and he’s been thwarting her for a week, she’s incredibly _wet_. Her body yields with some necessary awkwardness, but what it lacks in experience, it makes up for with enthusiasm.

“Try to breathe,” he says quietly.

“ _You_ breathe,” she says, because she’s pretty sure he hasn’t been doing it either.

He gives her a half smile. Eyes hazy, he watches her face and observes her expressions while his thumbs stroke across her skin at her hips. In steady increments, going forward by an inch and back by one half with every pinch and twinge, she takes him in.

When she’s finally settled at the bottom, it doesn’t hurt at all.

She feels slick and full and fevered.

It’s wonderful.

He sits up until his chest meets hers. There’s something about the way he’s looking at her, like he’s simultaneously on the other side of the world and here and nowhere else.

Pansy has always had, at best, reservations about sex of any kind, but so far it’s turned out to be revelatory and incendiary. The fact that she's discovered her enthusiasm for it with this particular boy is perfect. It's _overwhelming._ It's a lot of big, unexpected feelings all at once, and before she can stop them, a pair of tears escape, drip off her chin and fall on her breasts.

His eyes open wide. “I’m hurting you,” he says, and he tries to lift her up and pull himself down, to move out and away.

“No." She flings her arms around his neck and her legs around his back and clings to him hard. “You’re not hurting me. I just like you. So, so much.”

It takes kisses across his cheeks and eyes and mouth and an accidental, authentic moan close to his ear to convince him to relax again. Once he does, on instinct, she rolls her hips. The connection is wildly electric, close and wet and full of exactly the correct sort of friction, and she feels like she wants to run away from it but also never let it go.

He brings a hand between them, and the purpose of his week of trial and error blooms behind her eyes.

He's wanted her, she thinks, very much, but not if she didn't enjoy it in the way he's almost guaranteed to.

She wonders how you tell someone you're in love.

As her movements pick up speed, she hears him murmur, ". . .three CO two . . ." and then, " . . . nine adenosine . . ." and then he's quiet, and his lips move without any sound. He's lost in her body and the mystical incantations of cellular biology when she makes a final, decisive movement against him and voices a very loud, sex-specific cross between a whine and a shout that she’s sure she’ll be unable to think about in any other context without rolling her eyes.

" _Oh, thank God,_ ” he whispers into the sweat beaded in the hollow of her throat. He arcs up into her, his mouth drops to her breast, and he groans, long and relieved.

She decides she wants to stay like this, with his mouth wrapped around her nipple, for the rest of her life.

They separate long enough to dispense with the condom, and then she stretches her body over him, still naked, her head to his chest and her legs straight along his. She threads the fingers of her right hand between the fingers of his left, and he runs his free hand down along her back.

“I read an article in an encyclopedia once, at school,” she says, dozy and a bit delirious, “about average male refractory periods.” She tilts her eyes toward him without lifting her head.

He smiles, and shuts his eyes, and squeezes her fingers in his. “The box came with twelve.”

“Did you bring them all?”

“I brought four."

Once they’ve used two, Neville lights the wood in the fire pit. He brought a sweatshirt for himself and an extra one for Pansy, and when they wrap themselves together in the wool blanket and stretch lengthwise on the half log bench, she’s wearing her underpants, his undershirt, and his navy blue U hoodie with the white block letters.

The dance is still in full swing back at camp, and the sounds make their way across the lake. A song ends, there’s a pause of several minutes, and then what sounds like The Bangles echoes over the water and reaches them at the fireside.

“Do you think they’re alright?” Pansy asks. “The kids, I mean.”

“Yeah. I asked Cedric to do bed checks for Lion cabin tonight, and he and Ron are on Josh duty. They’ll be fine. We can stay for a bit.”

The firelight washes out some of the stars, and the height of meteor shower activity will happen in the hours after midnight, but at the end of the second week in August the Perseids are at their peak. Pansy points at every shooting star that streaks across the sky. 

“There!” She says it like she’s won.

Neville grabs a mosquito out of the air.

Pansy turns until her cheek rests on his chest. He’s breathing slow and deep, like there’s nothing in the world left to worry about.

“Pansy?”

“Yeah?”

He’s quiet for a long time, and her skin goes electric. He’s brave—awfully, awe-inspiringly brave about the things in life that really matter—but she's not, and he knows it.

“I want you to tell me." She tucks her hand under the bottom edge of his sweatshirt. “But later. Tomorrow."

He breathes in, and then out, and runs a hand through her hair. “Okay.”

She yawns, drowsy and tranquil. "I'll say it back.”

He kisses the top of her head.

Between his outstretched legs, she shifts her hips. She’s sore, but in a gratifying, accomplished way, like she feels the day after she’s done _Jane Fonda’s Workout_ on the carpeted floor of the TV room.

“You’re so warm," she murmurs.

A light streaks away from the heart of the constellation Perseus, and then another.

“There!” She points like she gets to keep every one of them she sees.

* * *

From halfway across the field, Pansy watches Neville nod and smile at Josh’s mom, who looks skeptical.

“He’s such a great kid,” she hears him say, and she almost chokes on her Bubble Yum. “He worked super hard in the lake this year.” He looks at Josh. “You finally did the Island swim, bud. Did you write your mom about that?”

Josh shakes his head.

“You gotta tell your mom this stuff. I’m eighteen and I still write to my grandma when I’m at camp.” He reaches out his hand. Josh submits willingly, almost happily, to some kind of mystical secret handshake she didn’t know the two of them had. “We’ll put that on our goal list for next year. I was really happy to have you here. See you next June, right?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Neville waves goodbye to Josh and his mom as they walk to their car hauling Josh’s gear, then he jogs to where Pansy stands with the last pair of Snake cabin girls, holding her sign-out clipboard.

“Nice sweatshirt.” His mouth pulls up into a half smile and he tugs at the pocket of the too-large navy blue U hoodie Pansy’s wearing, long enough to completely cover her shorts and make it look like she’s not wearing any.

Neville is clearly exhausted, but he’s also relaxed and obviously, palpably happy. Pansy suspects he was up before dawn rowing back out to the Island to strike their camp, wash the linens, and put everything away. When she’d made it down to the boat shed early in the morning, all the canoes were stored properly for the year, and she found Neville in the Lodge having a cup of coffee with Percy.

“Do you want it back?” She’s being coy, which is abominable, but she’s learned, and she knows she’ll continue to learn, that when it comes to Neville and her, things are different—better, more alarmingly perfect—than she expects.

“Can I get it from you in September?” He slips his hands into the front pocket of her sweatshirt— _his_ sweatshirt.

“You can come by my dorm and get it." She keeps her voice low, out of earshot of her campers. "I have a single room." She smiles without meaning to at the way his eyes grow wide.

“That is . . . that’s very interesting.”

“It probably won't smell like socks.”

“No, it definitely won't.” He scratches at a mosquito bite. “You smell good. Like really, really good.”

Pansy blows a bubble and pops it. "Yeah?"

“Yeah.”

Blaise jogs by, clipboard under his arm. He reaches over and slaps Pansy between the shoulder blades.

“Get that dick,” he whispers.

She punches him hard in the side and grimaces until she looks back at Neville.

It’s cool today, 75 degrees with partial cloud cover. The mild late morning sun gleams off his golden hair, grown in loose, shaggy waves over his eyebrows and the tops of his ears. His wrist is full of woven bracelets, and he has that gratefully depleted look of people who have spent long days outside enjoying themselves in the heat.

She thinks about his strong, beautiful body underneath his white camp shirt, his cute little four pack, and the warm, smooth skin that she first learned to want while it was tacky with sunscreen and sweat and lake water.

He’s tall and his eyes are gentle. He’s carved from marble and he shines in the sun.

Pansy clutches her clipboard to her chest and stares, mesmerized, from behind her Ray-Bans.

In the second week of August, lights stream from the heart of Perseus.

They're hers.

She sees them all.

★

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Epilogue.**  
>   
>  At the U, Pansy _tries_.  
>   
> After two years, her straight As carry her someplace new.  
>   
> She transfers to UCLA to finish her business degree, and to follow up on a job in makeup artistry she hears about from Oliver, who hears about it from a friend.  
>   
> She and Neville unpack a moving van in Santa Monica into their first shared apartment.  
>   
> They live together through two bachelor's degrees, one PhD, one ten-year stretch as a celebrity stylist, the two days Neville knows where he is in Yosemite but nobody else does, and all the years of diligent work in between it takes to get a cruelty free cosmetics business off the ground and soaring.  
>   
> As a surprise gift for Neville's 34th birthday, Pansy marries him under the blue palo verde tree he planted in the backyard of their Craftsman bungalow.  
>   
> She tells him about the other, much smaller, much _bigger_ surprise when everyone's gone home.  
>   
> On their honeymoon in the Adirondacks, they go night swimming.  
> 
> 
> ★
> 
>   
> Read all 8 interconnected stories of Camp Pigwidgeon in the summer of 1988 [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/rare_pair_spring_fling_2020).
> 
> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


End file.
